Tag Archives: Advertising

Recent Nielsen data confirms a seismic shift that is occurring in the demographics of American consumers. First released in 2015, Nielsen’s report on The Multicultural Edge revealed that multicultural consumers are “the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population.” While Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and other multicultural groups currently make up around 40% of the population, they are on track to be a numeric majority by 2044.

This young and growing segment of the consumer population is already driving changing trends in groceries and beverages and is poised to greatly impact markets such as technology, entertainment, and fashion and beauty as well. This segment of consumers offers an exciting opportunity and a challenge for today’s brand-makers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. How will we respond?Continue Reading

Early each year, leading global communications and marketing firm Edelman releases the results of their Trust Barometer survey. The Edelman Trust Barometer is the culmination of a global study of consumer trust in four key institutions – business, government, NGOs, and media. The newest iteration, conducted in 28 countries and encompassing more than 33,000 respondents, places a finger on the pulse of consumers across the world.

Would you be surprised to hear that in 2017 Edelman finds that “trust is in crisis around the world”? For the first time since they began tracking these metrics, “the majority of respondents now lack full belief that the overall system is working for them.” What might be at the root of this global decline in trust in our key institutions? How can we begin to rebuild consumer trust in an authentic and sustainable manner?Continue Reading

The online mattress brand Casper has emerged over the last two years as a force in social media marketing, disrupting the department store mattress racket and building its success on an unlikely target market. Casper’s novel approach bears examination; their path to market, product development, and audience outreach each contain valuable lessons for today’s entrepreneurs.Continue Reading

An estimated 80 to 90 million Millennials are in the United States, and they wield more purchasing power than you likely know. At approximately $1.3 trillion in annual buying power, it's clear Millennials aren't just avid consumers but avid influencers as well. Couple this power with their diverse viewpoints and lifestyles – and their frequent usage of evolving social media platforms – it's easy to see why many marketers spend a large amount of time figuring out how to best speak to this generation.

So what do Millennials want?

1. Personalization

Whether it's videos on YouTube, sponsored Facebook content, or the “deals-of-the-day” promoted on Twitter, it's clear many marketing strategies catered to Millennials are heavily focused on social media.

When Lilly Pulitzer, the world famous women's boutique, set out to design a highly personalized marketing strategy for the Millennial generation, they started by analyzing the influence of the wide range of marketing projects that already existed. In an article in Harvard Business Review, Omar Artun explains,

“Data analytics helped us identify critical points in the customer life cycle and develop relevant marketing programs that best engage the Lilly girl in each situation. The team married insights from this platform with observations of stores and larger marketplace research.”

While it's clear Millennials are interacting and engaging with one another on social media, simply placing content on those platforms without the usage of analytics won't get you far. As Lilly Pulitzer learned, it was far more effective to tailor unique messages to individuals based upon their purchase history than it was to create an archetypal model of the Millennial shopper. As always, figuring out which analytics provide meaningful returns is key to effectively personalizing your campaign.

2. Online Interaction

Millennials live on their phones and laptops. Everything marketing – inquiring, searching, interacting and, most important, purchasing — is all done on their devices. However, this digitization of life shouldn't make us think Millennials want a dehumanized experience. Instead, this online and digital life should be seen as a form of self-expression and personality. In essence, Millennials online to interact with and express themselves to a wider audience.

Effective marketing campaigns understand this need for personalization and self-expression. A survey completed in 2014 by The McCarthy Group, revealed that 84 percent of Millennials no longer exhibit trust in traditional forms of marketing. Radio spots, television ads and in-your-face pop-out messages achieve very little, as these types of marketing seem generic and company-focused—the opposite of the genuine, content-driven ads this generation longs to interact with. Meaghan Moraes, a marketing specialist and writer, explains in an article for HubSpot:

“Millennials know what they want and know how to find it online. If they decide they want to go for their master’s degree, odds are that an in-your-face pop-up ad wasn’t the deciding factor.”

Understanding that purchases are seen as a form of self-expression can help determine your messaging. Take Lilly Pulitzer for example. According to Artun in the above Harvard Business Review article,

“We also found that our Millennial consumers showed a willingness to spend more on brands that focus on quality and authenticity—they valued the fact that the company hand paints all prints in-house and hides special surprises in the patterns, just as Lilly herself did in in the late 1950s.”

3. Shareable Self-Expression

If being a brand participant is a part of many Millennials' identities, then it's important for brands to allow them easy ways to share that information. Going beyond simple social media sharing buttons, this means creating sharable content, unique hashtags, and easily accessible brand stories. Marketing to Millennials should be seen as starting a growing conversation, not a one-way dictation.

For the Lilly Pulitzer brand, this meant creating a unique Snapchat filter. This method got them unique results:

“Engaging with this audience on their platform of choice gave us the opportunity to build an emotional connection and to tell our brand story in a visual way (ideal given that color and print are the hallmarks of the Lilly brand). Lilly was the first fashion brand to work with Snapchat to offer branded Snapchat filters for users that visited Lilly stores. During our first two-week summer campaign, the Snapchat filters delivered 97 percent more engagements than on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter combined.”

Bridging the Gap

So what do Millennials want? Personalized, shareable, digital experiences. This sounds relatively simple, but in the real world, it's rarely executed effectively. I look forward to see how other brands successfully (and unsuccessfully) reach out to this generation that wields so much social influence. And once their day in the sun is over, I'll also look forward to watching Millennials crack the puzzle of marketing to their successors.

Al Eidson is the owner of Eidson & Partners, a business and marketing strategy consultancy, and a founder of SparkLabKC, an early-stage startup accelerator program in Kansas City. He's an expert in taking products to market and has launched more than 220 new products and ventures through his career. He's also proud of killing off a great many problematic products before they hit the market. His vision involves meaningful and lasting products through innovation.

I recently saw a piece of excellent spec work from some advertising students out of Germany titled “Dear Brother.” I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, but the spot is moving, effective and tells an incredible story. In working to produce the spot, film students Dorian Lebherz and Daniel Titz, enlisted the support of Ashton Hinkison, a London-based agency, to get the casting right. As Lebherz says in his interview with brandchannel,

Since this spot focuses much more on character than on plot, the casting process was very important to us…[The actors] portrayed that sensible authenticity we were looking for and when they met for the first time, it really seemed as if they'd known each other their whole life.

The power and authenticity of the spot got me thinking about how storytelling is so often used in varying degrees across marketing and branding.

For most of us, some recurring character or story line has shaped at least a small potion of our experiences with advertising: the Geico Gecko, Progressive's anthropomorphized “Mayhem,” even Verizon's “Can you hear me now?” character. With the growth of social media and the increase in different media the Internet provides, this marketing technique has exploded to great effect. As Lebherz goes on to say in his interview,

“We wanted to tell a story that captures the audience emotionally in a very short period of time… We believe a cinematic story that creates emotions is always stronger than a rich assembly of different settings without storytelling.”

Let's take a look at why and how these stories can create meaningful connections with consumers.